Online learning platforms provide network-based educational opportunities for users, which would otherwise be inconvenient or unavailable for those users. However, developing the software for such online learning platforms, and otherwise enabling network-based use and administration of such online learning platforms, is technically challenging.
For example, in typical online learning scenarios, thousands or millions of users may access the online learning platform, and thereby progress over time through many different courses of instruction. In other words, a current state of each such user with respect to the user's coursework will typically change over time, with varying rates of change. Moreover, some users may be enrolled in multiple courses at once, where the multiple courses may or may not be related to one another for a given user. For example, a particular user might take a group of courses as part of a larger concentration or group of courses, while other users may simply take individual ones of the same courses.
Further, online learning platforms, by definition, are built and intended for use by large numbers of users. As all of the users are progressing through the various courses at different rates and different times, it is difficult to quickly determine a current state of each user and/or for each course. For example, it may require an undesirably long time to calculate a current state of a user. In other cases, it may be technically challenging to quickly and accurately obtain desired state information, such as when various courses utilize a plurality of different interfaces and calculation techniques for determining state information. In more specific examples, it may occur that users' grades (and rules for combining grades) are spread across different systems, possible in slow-to-access forms. In such cases, it may be necessary to wait for unacceptably long times to retrieve the data needed to calculate a state that is dependent on multiple grades. For these and other reasons, it may difficult or impossible for users and administrators to determine desired state information in a fast and efficient manner.